Abstract
Language is used for influencing people. Various means, whether honest or dishonest, are appealed to for achieving this purpose. This means that people fulfill their goals either through telling their interlocutors the truth or through deceiving and misleading them. In this regard, deception is a key aspect of many strategic interactions including bargaining, military operations, and politics. However, in spite of the importance of this topic, it has not been pragmatically given enough research attention particularly in politics. Thus, this study sets itself the task of dealing with this issue in this genre from a pragmatic perspective. Precisely, the current work attempts to answer the following question: What is the pragmatics of deception in American presidential electoral speeches? Pragmatics, here, involves the speech acts used to issue deceptive utterances, deceptive strategies resulting in the violation of Grice's maxims, as well as cognitive strategies.In other words, this study aims at finding out the answer to the question raised above. In accordance with this aim, it is hypothesized that American presidential candidates use certain deceptive/misleading strategies to achieve their goals. In this regard, they utilize certain strategies which violate Grice's maxims such as ostensible promise, equivocation, fabrication, and dissociation. Moreover, they make use of certain cognitive strategies like: metaphor, presupposition, and positive self-representation/ negative other representation.In order to achieve the aim of the study and verify or reject its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under examination. Besides, a statistical means represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results. The most important finding arrived at by this study is that American presidential candidates most often resort to the strategies of giving an ostensible promise, equivocation, presupposition, and positive self/negative other representation to fulfill their goals.
Highlights
According to Carson (2010, p. 43), deception is a deliberate enterprise which is typically defined as causing another to be misled
The current work attempts to answer the following question: What is the pragmatics of deception in American presidential electoral speeches? Pragmatics, here, involves the speech acts used to issue deceptive utterances, deceptive strategies resulting in the violation of Grice's maxims, as well as cognitive strategies
In order to quantitatively support the findings of the pragmatic analysis and verify or reject the hypothesis of the study, a statistical analysis is conducted by means of the percentage equation
Summary
According to Carson (2010, p. 43), deception is a deliberate enterprise which is typically defined as causing another to be misled. As Carson (ibid.) asserts, is that it generates conversational implicatures by means of infringing one or more of Grice’s four dimensions of cooperative discourse. This does not mean that deception is limited to the breaching of Grice’s maxims. Rather, it includes other pragmatic issues like speech acts and cognitive strategies; they all represent the pragmatics of deception in this study. Through the use of specific strategies, including deceptive strategies, presidential candidates can accomplish their own political goals which are intended to mold people’s thought, mislead them, and persuade them to act as they (i.e., politicians) wish. According to Wilson (1990, p. 50), politicians’ language is designed to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectful and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
